They will, in the immortal words of John Cleese clutching a stuffed Norwegian blue in a Monty Python sketch almost 30 years ago, soon be no more. They will cease to be. They will go to meet their maker. They will be late parrots.

Conservationists yesterday invoked the famous parrot sketch in a new campaign to save parrots from extinction. More than one quarter of the parrot family - the psittaciformes - are threatened or in imminent danger of extinction, the World Wide Fund for Nature revealed.

The WWF, the World Conservation Union, the Cornwall-based World Parrot Trust and, by video from Santa Barbara zoo, John Cleese himself launched the campaign to save 89 species of parrot in the Americas, south-east Asia, the Indian Ocean and Australia.

These include the Spix's macaw - there is only one male left in the wild in Bahia, Brazil - the New Zealand kakapo, a ground-dwelling parrot that exists only in semi-captivity, the echo parakeet of Mauritius and the huge and beautiful hyacinth macaw, whose last stronghold in Bolivia is about to be disrupted by oil pipelines.

Coveted as pets

Lear's macaw on the Brazilian plateau is down to 150, while the redtailed amazon in Sao Paulo numbers more than 4,000. Some, like the scarlet macaw, with more than 10,000 in the wild in Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana to Peru, are listed as "vulnerable" but are particularly coveted by pet-keepers and are likely to become rapidly more vulnerable as the Amazon forests are cleared.

Scientists and campaigners want to set up recovery teams to save each species and urge governments to tackle the two greatest threats to parrots: the loss of forests in which to live and multiply and the trade in wildlife for collectors.

More than half of the world's original forests have been cleared, burned or fragmented. And the commercial trade in parrots is a significant part of the $5bn (£3bn) annual international trade in wildlife. But for every wild parrot that makes it safely to a perch in a collector's cage, four die along the way. Altogether 27 species have become extinct, including the Carolina parakeet of North America and island birds such as the Seychelles parakeet, the Cuban macaw and the Rodriguan blue, from the island of Rodrigues, next to Mauritius.

Habitats destroyed

There are around 10,000 species of birds altogether, and one species in 10 is endangered. There are 330 species of parrot, and 27% are at risk. Island parrots are most at risk because of habitat destruction and the introduction of unfamiliar predators such as rats, which take both eggs and fledglings and sometimes nesting adults.

There are only 800 St Vincent parrots on the island of St Vincent and fewer than 2,000 blue lorikeets left in the Society islands of the Pacific.

In Amazonia, forests are dwindling, food supplies are imperilled and parrots are part of a lucrative trade. But in captivity many are hard to breed. Parrot specialists have for more than a decade watched helplessly as the wild Spix's macaw population fell to one. Between 30 and 40 exist in captivity, but conservationists have been unable to obtain breeding partners or eggs to be hatched.

The male Spix has been partnered with an Illiger's macaw, in the hope that the pair could be persuaded to foster fertilised Spix eggs. This would require the cooperation of the private collectors. There had, said Mike Reynolds of the World Parrot Trust, been no such cooperation yet.

Carl Jones brought the echo parakeet of Mauritius back to life by direct action. In 1987 it was down to eight when, to the alarm of conservation funding bodies, he started collecting eggs, hatching them and hand-rearing parakeets in a protected area. There are now 109 in the wild, and another 22 captive-reared birds were released into the wild last year.

He has also helped to restore the Mauritius kestrel and the pink pigeon, both native to the island home of the most famous extinct bird, the dodo. The Mauritius government has created a national park to preserve their habitats. "We have the technology to save all the endangered species of the world," said Dr Jones.

The parrot action plan is aimed at conservationists and governments of more than 50 countries. "What we are looking for is an effective system of protected areas which cover all types of forests, which will look after the world's parrots and indeed all the other species that are found in the forests," said Paul Toyne of WWF-UK. "We need to connect fragments of forests, and we need to protect them. We are calling on the governments to get at least 10% of the world's forests managed and protected."

Legal trade halved

Ten years ago 700,000 parrots were legally imported to the EU; the trade has fallen to 350,000. But rare parrots are still being smuggled in illegally. "The majority of parrots that are kept in captivity are captive-bred," Dr Toyne said. "The conservation message has got through to pet owners. The demand for parrots from the wild coming into the UK is decreasing."

John Cleese - on videotape, intermittently interrupted by an Amazon parrot that could sing "Alouette" and other ballads - said all the parrots needed human help. "Help parrots to survive in the wild and survive in our homes. We need the rainforests as much as the parrots do, because the rainforests are the lungs of the planet. They are essential for human health. These forests provide many of our most vital medicines, including certainly some that haven't been discovered yet."